During the 8th TUC Meeting held at Oracle’s facilities in Redwood City, California, Zhe Wu, Software Architect at Oracle Spatial and Graph, explained how is his team trying to bridge RDF Graph and Property Data Models.

After making a brief overview about what is a graph he presented Oracle’s Graph strategy, they basically treat graphs as another data type on every platform (Hadoop, Oracle’s own database and, of course, in the Cloud). He also explained that his team is developing in 3 directions at the same time:

RDF and SPARQL, trying to improve performance year after year.

Property Graph Data Model, working towards having it implemented in the next rollout of Oracle’s Database.

Other types of data, mainly spatial and relational data but they’re also working with JSON

They realised that graphs are rarely a solution themselves but a part of a flow. That’s why they are working on facets (Security, Searchability, User Interface, Programming Interface, Tools, Scalability…) in addition to these 3 directions.

After this explanation, Mr. Wu explained what use cases are supported by 2 of the products his company is commercializing. The RDF Support, for example, is built upon 4 major functions:

Reasoning. Built-in the database and it also allows for third parties to plug-in their custom reasoning.

Tools and Analytics.

After the explanation of Oracle’s products Zhe Wu tried to answer the initial question of his talk: Can an application make use of both graph data models? In short, yes. There’re many ways of doing so but these are the steps Wu gave to the audience:

Stick them into the same repository.

Force them to speak the same language (SQL, Java, REST…)

Disguise one as the other.

Specify

To conclude his talk, the Architect pointed out that most graph users lack a standard property graph query language and the learning curve for RDF and OWL users can be too steep. He mentioned that his team is working towards improving Semantic web/RDF/OWL and to include property graphs in Oracle’s RDBMS